OUT LIKE A LAMB: Today's Guardian reports that the unquiet life of Andrea Dworkin has come to a quiet end. I've heard it said that every Martin Luther King needs a Malcolm X to serve as a lightning rod, and Dworkin certainly fit that bill for a generation of feminist scholars and activists. I'm really not qualified to deliver any proper obituary, having never known anyone to completely buy into Dworkin's view of the world. Even my most activist lesbian friends seemed to take the position that -- to paraphrase Randy Newman's southerner's nod to Lester Maddox -- "she may be a fool but she's our fool."
In any event, I did learn two things from the Guardian obit. First, although I always believed Dworkin to be fervently anti-man (in college, I went to a talk she gave where she agreed to take questions only from women), her life partner was a man. Second, either the Guardian uses poor fact-checking or Gloria Steinem added a letter to her name.
No comments:
Post a Comment